There's an Opportunity Here
by Uozumi
Summary: The man sitting across from Ben at the table is part babysitter, part invader, and about to save his bacon while helping solidify a choice in Ben's life.


**Fandom** _Doctor Who_ (2005)/_Supernatural_  
**Chapter Character(s)/Pairing(s)** Amy, Ben, Eleventh Doctor, Lisa, Rory; pairings aren't integral to the story, but there is some Amy/Rory  
**Genre** Coda/Crossover/Episode Related/Scifi  
**Rating** PG  
**Word Count** 2542  
**Disclaimer** Doctor Who c. Newman, Webber, Wilson, BBC; Supernatural c. Kripke, CW, WB  
**Summary** The man sitting across from Ben at the table is part babysitter, part invader, and about to save his bacon while helping solidify a choice in Ben's life.  
**Warning(s)** non-humanoid alien deaths, spoilers up through season six episode fourteen of Supernatural, spoilers for the 2010 season of Doctor Who (2005).  
**Notes** There was this line and I couldn't let it go. This is set a few days, maybe a week after season six episode fourteen of_Supernatural_.

_**There's an Opportunity Here**_

The Doctor set him on edge. He set him on edge so badly. Yet, at the same time, Ben could not help but like him. Ben sat across from him at the table with his math homework spread out across it and a stack of magazines beside the Doctor. After calling Dean behind his mother's back, Ben was under supervision after school while she was at work again. He could almost remember the joy of being able to come home and not have to answer to anyone for three hours like a normal middle schooler, but those days were temporarily gone. "If you're a doctor," he put his pencil down, "why aren't you off doing doctor things?"

"I am." The Doctor flipped a page in _Astronomy_, a magazine Ben had been getting since his last birthday. It was a present from Dean and Ben always made certain the subscription knew how to find him.

"You're reading_Astronomy_, not cutting people open," Ben pointed out.

"I'm not that type of doctor." His eyes rose to meet Ben's eyes.

The gaze was unnerving, though Ben was uncertain if the Doctor meant it that way. Ben was never certain of anything with him and that made the Doctor seem less human the more time he spent around him. "Then what kind of doctor are you?"

A grin spread across his face as if that was the question he was waiting for since he arrived in their neighborhood with his friends months ago. "Do you want to see?"

Ben blinked. "See?" What would there be to see? Unless this was all new agey and the Doctor had a home practice.

"Do you want to see what kind of doctor I am?"

Ben thought long and hard and then shook his head. "But you can tell me." If he could not trust this person thing completely, then he should not go off to unknown places with him. Dean might not think he was a good teacher, but Ben thought knowing this made him smarter than his classmates in some respects. He had no proof the Doctor was not going to kill him at some point and harvest his organs for some nefarious purpose. Not that he would be safe from something like that at a kitchen table surrounded by drawers with knifes in them.

The Doctor moved into a flurry of activity after Ben's statement. He started flipping through the pages of the stack of_Astronomy_ magazines beside him at the table, looking for something. After tossing five magazines over his shoulder haphazardly, he thrust the sixth magazine at Ben. "Aha! Here it is." He pointed his finger at a full-page spread of celestial landscape. Ben looked at the picture and then at the Doctor. It reminded him of their initial meeting months ago, how his eyes seemed to be waiting for Ben to know something only the Doctor knew.

Ben had not seen the three adults move in across the street, but one Sunday morning they approached the house when he was raking up leaves and his mother was trimming some of the plants at the front of the house. With the Doctor was a man with sandy hair and a red headed babe.

"Uh…" the man with the sandy colored hair said, "we just moved in. I'm Rory and this is my wife Amy and our," there was a pause, "friend."

"Hello," the Doctor offered.

Normally, Ben's attentions would have been covertly trying to check out Amy's thighs, but that one word from the Doctor captured all of his attention. It was an odd red flag. It was a greeting like any other delivered in a normal enough, believable enough British accent, but it was not normal. The unease did not stem from how the Doctor dressed but more the look in his eyes. He was waiting for something, expecting something from them. Ben only partially registered this in their first meeting.

"I'm Lisa. This is Ben." His mother returned and the group dissolved into a kind of chitchat reserved for such first time greetings. Ben kept his eye on the Doctor who had moved from the middle of their yard to inspect the plants up by the front of the house. Eventually, while Ben was answering some unimportant questions about trash day from Rory, Ben spied on his mother and the Doctor.

"I never caught your name." His mother was sharp. She was not trusting of these people yet, but they had not given her a reason to distrust them either yet.

"I'm the Doctor."

"'The Doctor? Is that really your name?'" Lisa gave the man this look. Ben had seen it before. He knew he got his flirtatious nature from his mother, but it was a bit distressing to see her showing that side of her to someone who set Ben slightly on edge.

Ben watched Amy glance over at the Doctor as though trying to communicate something to him she knew he might not notice. Rory was oblivious. Neither of them set Ben on edge at all. He could not figure out what made them so different from the Doctor, when they were both weird as well.

"I'm Doctor…" he looked down at the welcome mat on the steps, "Matt." He smiled a little lopsided then. "Yes, Doctor Matt."

"His parents were a bit off," Amy supplied. "Mr. and Mrs. Matt," she added with a tone Ben knew now she reserved for things she thought was funny but she could not laugh properly at them.

That look, that initial look the Doctor gave him then was so much like the look the Doctor gave Ben now at the kitchen table. "Look," the Doctor said, "and tell me what you see."

Ben eyed him and then took the magazine and sat back in his chair with it. He had studied this celestial landscape more than once. It was a photograph taken of Mars with everything else possible to see with a wide-angle lens around it. He scoured the picture, trying to see what it was he needed to see. There was Mars, Phobos, Deimos….

Then he saw it.

"There's a spot." Ben lowered the magazine down on the table and stared. He ran his finger along the spot to get it off the page, but it was a spot on the photo, not dirt. "Printing error?"

"No."

Ben looked at the Doctor and then back at the spot. It looked uniform in shape, not like an inkblot, but it was too small to really see it. "Then what is it?"

The Doctor did not answer, but he leaned back in his seat and surveyed Ben. "I'm going to show you something before that. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat. "This is going to be cool."

"You think bow ties are cool."

"They are, but this is better." Out of his pocket came a metal device with a green light bulb on the end of it. Ben could not help but notice how the sunlight reflected off the surface and how ominous the device looked despite its small size.

"What is that? Some sort of laser pointer?"

The Doctor's face faulted. "No, it's a sonic screwdriver."

"A what?"

"I'll show you." The Doctor stood up and pointed it at a flour container and the container exploded when a weird buzzing noise filled the room. Instead of flour turning everything white and making a big mess, five fat grub looking monsters began wriggling out of the debris.

"This way." The Doctor grabbed Ben and shoved him towards the kitchen door and around towards the stairway upstairs. "There's a footlocker you've hidden under your bed."

"How do you – "

"No time for that. Now that they're out of the container, they're going to inflate slightly and slither faster than you can run." He opened Ben's door and then shut it and aimed the screwdriver at the handle, creating a lock. "That won't hold long. Get the footlocker out."

"Wait. Just wait." Ben held up his hands. "That footlocker is Dean's. You don't get to go through it until I know what's going on."

"Those things are called parnsneep," the Doctor explained. "They are grubs and feast on iron-based blood. Your mother and I haven't been dating, she's been helping search for their queen. We found the queen three nights ago and that's not the problem."

"But you have your friends to help you," Ben pointed out. "Why Mom?"

"Because she can smell the queen."

"'Smell the…?'"

There was a gurgling noise near the base of his bedroom door. Ben stiffened instinctively. He had salt hidden in his room just in case. He wondered if it would work on the monsters.

"They're already at the door. We need the necklace from the footlocker."

"Necklace?" Ben heard the noise at his door again, an unearthly thump. He knelt by his bed and hauled the footlocker out from under it. "I don't know the combination."

The Doctor reinforced the lock on the door and then walked over. "Don't need one when you have this." He aimed the sonic screwdriver at the footlocker and it popped open. He knelt beside Ben and began to paw through the contents, searching. "I know its here. It's been giving off low frequencies…AHA." He pulled out a small bronze charm threaded onto a black thong.

"Dean said his brother gave it to him twice," Ben stated and kept an eye on the necklace. "He might want it back."

The Doctor sat back and examined the necklace. "Well…I'm sure he'd understand, because we have to break it if we don't want those parnsneeps to eat you and your whole state."

Ben considered this and then nodded. "Yeah. Probably." Dean never wore it anymore either. Ben was not sure how he was going to explain it if Dean came looking for the necklace, but after four nights ago, he doubted he would ever see Dean again unless he personally sought the man out himself.

The otherworldly thumps against Ben's door began to take on a rhythmic beat. The Doctor grabbed up the necklace and smacked it five times to the rhythm of the parnsneeps as hard as he could against Ben's wall. Then he used his sonic screwdriver to work the chip into a crack. Before the necklace could split, he stopped the crack. "Alright, Ben," he looked at the boy who was already on his feet. "Put your fingers in your ears and cover them tight with your hands. This is going to get loud."

Ben hesitated then did so. He split his gaze between the Doctor, the necklace, and his door. The wood was already starting to splinter in places from the rhythmic force of the parnsneeps.

"Alright then," the Doctor said and held the pendant up high. "One for the money," he flicked a bit of the charm away, "two for the show," he caught Ben's dubious expression, "oh all right…just keep your ears covered.

"Here we go!"

The last bit of the charm fell away from the thong and an orangey gas appeared in the air before a humming began. It started out quite low but then soon it was loud enough that it rattled the dishes downstairs, made Ben's artwork fall off his walls, and threatened to topple more than one unsecured item in the household. The parnsneeps outside Ben's door shrieked and howled, their screams louder than the humming until everything went very still and very silent abruptly.

Ben thought he could smell moldy rubber. He was not sure how he knew what that might smell like, but it was the best description.

"Alright. It's clear." The Doctor went over to the door, unlocked it, and opened it up. The five grubs were smoldering in the hallway. Ben peered around the doctor for a better look.

"Do we salt and burn them?" He could not imagine zombie grubs.

"Salt and…? No, no." The Doctor looked at Ben. "We find something to put them in and then I will take them where they belong in the TARDIS."

"But they're dead." Ben was torn about poking one of them with his shoe. He did not know what would happen but he wanted to be sure that they were dead.

"Yes and where they come from the plants feed on the carcasses. That's where they belong." The Doctor picked up a Lego bin and overturned it on Ben's bed so all the Legos fell out. He began carefully placing the bodies into the empty bin. Not to be seen as weak or girly, Ben took a deep breath and began to help.

"So…" Ben eyed the Doctor after the bin was safely sealed. "This means you're going to leave soon, right?"

"I have to do a last sweep of the area for the parnsneeps, but once they're gone then yes." He stood up and hefted the Lego container up onto his shoulder to make the weight easier to carry. He looked at Ben again with that expectant gaze. "Are you coming?"

"Where?"

"To the TARDIS. Don't you want to see it?" The Doctor started down the hall once it seemed Ben would follow him. "It's that speck in the photo spread I showed you."

Ben did not answer readily. Even after all he had seen he still could not look at the Doctor without the unsettled feeling. The man had saved his life, and yet…. Ben stopped at the top of the stairs. If the TARDIS was the spot on the picture, then it was some sort of space ship. That would explain the monsters they just killed and how weird the Doctor was. It did not, however, explain how normal Amy and Rory were compared to the Doctor, but Ben did not need that explanation.

The Doctor stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked back up at Ben. "The TARDIS is my space ship." He watched Ben's face contort slightly. "I'll take you wherever you want to go and have you back before your mother comes home."

Ben finally nodded. "Alright." When he watched the Doctor go down the stairs, it occurred to him the opportunity before him. This was an alien and one that so far showed no signs of wanting to kill Ben, his mother, or anyone else. If he observed this alien, he could perhaps understand it. He had been thinking since his talk with Dean about what he wanted to do with his life. Dean said he could do anything with it, and this afternoon sealed the decision Ben had been working towards since the changeling incident years ago.

Ben wanted to be a hunter. He wanted to fight the things nobody else saw, save people from things they should never have to know about. To do that, he was going to have to understand things that people never saw. This man offering to take him for a quick round about in his space ship was one of those things.

Ben headed down the stairs, unlocked the front door, and held it open for the Doctor and his bin of parnsneeps. "Lead the way."

**The End**


End file.
